Driven to extremes

It’s an election-year tradition: A pundit says this has been an unusually nasty campaign, and a rival commentator plays the you-ignorant-dolt card by saying, for example, “Hey, you have no idea how nasty 1972 was – what Nixon and McGovern were saying about each other.”

But peruse the anger-filled online comments on any political story or check the email in-box of political journalists, and you’ll see for yourself that no campaign in modern history has had the sheer volume of nastiness as this one. The twist: It’s coming from rank-and-file partisans (and some in the media) far more than from Republican and Democratic campaigns.

The culprit, I believe, is primarily media technology and the centrifugal effect it is having on Americans who follow politics. Twenty years ago, there were a handful of national media outlets, producing relatively homogeneous narratives on major national issues in which there generally appeared to be some agreement on a shared set of facts. Nowadays, however, the norm for many die-hard partisans is to scan news aggregation websites, social media and cable TV shows that reflect and pander to their political views, and thus feel reassured that their side – their team – isn’t just right, it’s morally superior.

These partisans don’t have moments of cognitive dissonance – the discomfort someone feels when they are forced to reconcile between two conflicting beliefs or are confronted with evidence that their strongly held views on a topic may be wrong. Instead, they get constant reinforcement of the nobility and accuracy of their beliefs.

This has a centrifugal effect, driving people away from the center or from any nuanced perspective that holds, hey, on some issues one party is right and the other party is wrong. This inability of so many Americans to identify in any way with the views of those on the other side of the political spectrum increasingly crystallizes in pure bile.

Which brings us to Barack Obama. How he handled the dire circumstances he found upon taking office, the profound change of course he oversaw on U.S. health care, the severity of continued unemployment – all are factors that would make him controversial in any media era.

But in our current poisonous climate, the Obama presidency has generated mass crescendos of stupidity and hatred among a huge swath of the public.

On the right, millions of people still believe the bizarre theory that in 1961, the president’s mom – an 18-year-old University of Hawaii student from Kansas – decided it would be better for her first child to be born in Third World Kenya or Indonesia than a modern hospital in First World Oahu. Why would they believe this? Because alternative media on the right – the fringes, not National Review or The Wall Street Journal editorial page – found the conspiracy theory an easy way to try to discredit the newcomer who went from obscurity to national figure more quickly than any politician since Jimmy Carter. And the mendaciously populist Drudge Report gave “birthers” the megaphone to get their theory before a mass audience.